Devious - Lisa Jackson [194]
“Val!” Slade yelled, his deep voice reverberating through the halls.
Surprised, Devota glanced toward the sound.
Val touched the barrel of the gun with the tip of her fingers, but it spun away again, skittering over the stones.
Devota turned back and saw Val’s mistake. “Stupid Jezebel!” With surprising agility, Devota leaped forward, her fingers curled like talons over the knife, her shadow a hideous wraith. “Die!” She thrust her arm out. The wicked blade gleamed steely blue, slashing downward, bits of blood flying.
Val flung herself to one side.
Too late.
Hot pain seared down her shoulder.
“Die! Damned your heathen soul to Satan!” Devota hissed, and jerked her knife upward, determined to plunge it into Valerie’s heart.
“Stop, you goddamned bitch!” Slade yelled from somewhere in the shadows, somewhere behind the killer’s back. “Drop the knife!”
From the corner of her eye, Val saw him step into the light, his face drawn, his eyes blazing, ten feet from Devota’s back. Fury twisted his features, but he didn’t give Devota a second to think.
Throwing himself across the tomb as if to tackle her, he shot forward, airborne.
Devota spun, twisting the knife.
Oh, God!
With insidious delight in her eyes, the she-devil intended to rip Slade from his neck to his crotch, spilling his guts.
“No! No! No!” Val cried, and threw herself toward the gun just as a horrible, wet, rasping scream issued from the bloody lips of Sister Charity.
In one last, desperate act, as if propelled by God, the dying nun flung her body upward, knocking Devota down onto the bed of the tattered wedding dress, Charity’s half-dressed body pinning Devota to the floor as she gasped for breath.
Swearing, Slade skidded across the floor on his shoulder.
Devota reacted. “Why can’t you just die?” she screamed at Charity, then plunged the knife deep, burying the blade between the older woman’s breasts.
Blood from Charity’s neck poured over Devota and dripped onto the wedding dress.
“Get off me!” Devota ordered, trying vainly to free herself. Val reached the pistol just as Charity Varisco, her biological mother, died holding down Camille’s killer.
Slade scrambled to his feet.
“Don’t do it, Val,” he warned, but he was too late.
With dead calm, ignoring the pain in her shoulder and ankle, Valerie crawled over to the two nuns and placed the muzzle hard against the younger woman’s temple.
She would have pulled the trigger, but Slade’s fingers wrapped around hers. “No,” he said, shaking his head, drawing her close. “It’s over.”
The sound of footsteps, thundering wildly, resonated through the tomb.
The police.
Finally.
Val sagged against her husband, her emotions ragged, her heart dark. This, the crumpled form of a woman with scars crisscrossing her back, was her mother, the woman who had given her life and, in the end, saved it. Tears filled her eyes, and she blinked hard, clinging to Slade, wondering how she had ever doubted him, silently swearing she would never let him go again.
“It’s all right,” he said, his voice a whisper in the unused air of the musty room. “It’s all right.” One arm held her fiercely to him, infusing her with his strength.
Flashlight beams wobbled and crisscrossed before landing on the carnage.
“Stop! Police!” Bentz ordered.
“Drop your weapons!” someone else shouted.
“Joseph, Mary, and Jesus. Oh, God, what a mess!” Montoya’s voice, seeming to come out of a mist of pain.
With Slade’s help, she let go of the gun. Her fingers unclenched and it fell, slowly. The barrel clanged noisily against the floor.
“Help me!” Devota cried. “Help me. They tried to kill me. Please . . .”
“Don’t believe her,” Slade said to Montoya, his breath ruffling Valerie’s hair.
“I don’t,” Montoya said. “Then again, I don’t trust anyone.”
Slade wrapped his arm more tightly around his wife and said again, “It’s over.”
She clung to him and bit back tears. She knew she’d never let him go again . . . but she also knew he lied.
This horror, the breadth of Sister Devota’s madness and cruelty, wouldn’t be over for a long, long time.
If ever.
CHAPTER